The Wild Frontier: More Tales from the Remarkable Pastby Berton, Pierre

Canada's wild frontier – a land unsettled and unknown, a land of appalling obstacles and haunting beauty – comes to life through seven remarkable individuals, some of whom are: John Jewitt, the young British seaman who became a slave to the mercurial chief of the Nootka Indians of Vancouver Island; Dr. Wilfred Grenfell, the eccentric missionary; Sam Steele, the most famous of all Mounted Policemen; and Isaac Jogues, the seventeenth-century priest who courted martyrdom. Many of these stories read like the wildest of fiction: Cariboo Cameron, who, after striking it rich in British Columbia, pickled his wife's body in alcohol, gave her three funerals, and then was forced by gossip to dig her up again; Mina Hubbard, the young widow who trekked across the unexplored heart of Labrador as an act of revenge against the man she blamed for her husband's death; and Almighty Voice, the renegade Cree, who was the key figure in the last battle between white men and Aboriginals in North America.

Spanning more than two centuries and four thousand miles, these tales demonstrate how our frontier resembles no other and how for better and for worse it has shaped our distinctive sense of Canada